This past week, President Barack Obama offered up a solution to racial unrest and urban rioting that many expect to sweep across inner city neighborhoods this summer – spend more money.
The president said that more government spending would reduce the hopelessness found in inner cities (like Baltimore which has been governed exclusively by Democrats for decades) – a “major factor” in recent flashes of racial unrest.
The president gave his remarks in Camden, New Jersey to showcase reforms that city’s police department has made to improve relations with its community quickly adding that “expanding opportunities” for young people in impoverished areas of the country would take more than just policing reforms.
The president did not explain the relationship between senseless violence, attacks on police, the wholesale looting, arson and the destruction of property and the inability of government to “expand job opportunities” in cities that haven’t earned them.
Continuing with platitudes, the president said:
“A lot of the issues that have been raised here go beyond policing…we can’t ask the police to contain and control problems that the rest of us aren’t willing to face or do anything about…”
“The kids who grow up here are part of America, just like our kids are,” he said. “If we are not investing in them, no matter how good the police are doing, these kids are going to still be challenged, so we’ve all got to step up.”
Then the president rattled off the laundry list of failed left-wing programs that need more funding including:
“…early childhood education… the creation of “promise zones”… expansion of the president’s “My Brother’s Keeper” program… more federal grants to cities to improve educational opportunities, boost public health and reduce crime”.
President neglected to mention that Baltimore had already received more than $1.8 billion in stimulus spending to fund these same types of “opportunity” programs before the Baltimore race riots that broke out in April.
Needless to say, the president’s comments match those of other Democrats who have said that poverty is the root cause of violence and unrest in U.S. cities.
And rather than ask inner city youths to take responsibility for getting jobs and developing workplace skills like showing up to keep jobs, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, (D-NV), prescribes the usual bromides – Congress needs to pass bills that create jobs.
While Reid said, “It is up to us in this Capitol to create these jobs”, he ignores the commonsense reluctance of entrepreneurs and small businesses – the twin engines of job creation – to set up shop in areas that politicians write off as places where those who want to destroy, have a place to destroy.